Biggest employers

Company culls

Correction to this articleUBS, Switzerland's biggest bank, announced 3,500 “staff reductions” on August 23rd in efforts to save costs. Last week, Bank of America reported it would cut 3,500 jobs (adding to the 2,500 it had already made this year) and last month Cisco, the world's largest maker of networking equipment, announced it was shedding 6,500 jobs. But of the world's biggest corporate employers (our chart excludes state behemoths like China's army) the US Postal Service shed the most jobs between 2009 and 2010, cutting its workforce by 6%. The contrast between the two charts below is striking: the biggest employers includes several Chinese state-backed companies that may be unfamiliar to readers outside China. The companies that have shed most jobs, on the other hand, are almost all Western outfits with famous names.

Correction: An earlier version of this chart and text incorrectly stated that Tesco had shed the most jobs between 2009 and 2010. This was not the case. In fact, Tesco increased its workforce by 3,500 jobs. We apologise for the error.

600 Years before the Birth of Jesus Christ, the Chinese organized a work party of over one million including ancillary support to build the Great Wall of China--a defensive structure and road complex that is longer than the distance from Los Angeles to NYC.

Using only Neolithic tools and the newly invented wheel. No power equipment, telephones, GPS or computers. Logistic = hand drawn cart. I can't even imagine how they kept the payroll!

Albertican hits the nail on the head. These companies are hiring tons of people but yet do not have the revenues to justify that. That is typical in an economy that is still predominantly state runned and not subjected to much competition.

Many American corporations generate way more revenue than China's biggest employers. But they cut down on labor costs significantly by outsourcing, contracting, and replacing humans with technology (capital intensive). Of course this has its down side..just look at the U.S. unemployment rate compared to a place like China's. U.S. companies care less about giving their country men a job and are willing to cut them out of the equation in a heartbeat if it means increasing their profits. Profits over people has become the American way and that's one of the main reasons why Americans are suffering from a lack of good jobs. The free markets reign principle has lead to more wealth being generated..the problem is much of it stays in the hands of those already wealthy and aren't trickling down to the poor/ middle class to make any real difference.

Of course 'corporate' is somewhat in the eye of the beholder - is a Chinese state-owned company better so described than the UK National Health Service (a huge employer with 1.3M staff)? Or indeed the US postal service?

The oil companies are the ones that interest me. Compare China National Petroleum to ExxonMobil. China National has 1.5 million employees and a yearly revenue of $165 billion last year. ExxonMobil has 83,600 employees and a yearly income of $383 billion last year. A large part of this difference is that Exxon, like all big private oil companies these days, outsources almost all of the actual labour to contractors (like Baker Hughes, Haliburton, Schlumberger etc), so Exxon probably never drills a well itself or owns a drilling rig, preferring to own the rights to fields and the infrastructure to produce from them, a much more lucrative position. I don't have the numbers here, but Exxon's total employees is a fraction of what it was at its height (or to be precise, the sum of its then independent constituent companies at its height), when they did do their own drilling and completion and so on.

But even so, I find it hard to believe that 1.5 million people are required to run a company less than half as big by revenue as ExxonMobil. These numbers strongly suggest to me that Chinese oil companies are grossly overstaffed and under-productive. One might expect this from a state-run behemoth like China National, which seems to me more an example of communist dogma than a modern oil company.

What struck me was the Aviation Industry Corporation of China. They don't produce planes, do they... at least not yet. But they employ 400,000 people? No way. There is something wrong with the picture. Besides, what planemaker needs to employ so many mechanics? Planemaking is capital-intensive, even if, say, you choose not to outsource anything. Even if you employees are also security guards at airports. Even if they also make toy planes. And yet, they employ more people than Tesco or HSBC. Explain.

Some of the comments on this post make no sense on a site about economics. People don't seem to realize that there are differences between the US and China. In developing countries like China capital is expensive while labour is cheap. It's cheap to add workers but expensive to add machinery or make large capital investments. So that is why you have more workers.

In time, when labour costs rise you will see companies going for more automation. You are already seeing some companies move in this direction. Foxconn, for example, announced recently that it planned to greatly increase the number of assembly robots it uses.

@Giuliano Sider AVIC is the holding company for all of China's military aircraft manufacturers - so just imagine a combination of Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, and you can understand how they could have 400,000 employees.

Thanks for pointing this out. Is it just me or does the Economist seem to make very general remarks based upon very limited sources? Ive only been a reader for a few mths now but I find this very unprofessional...

Don't mean to sound like a pedant: However, I believe a "great wall" was assembled under the Qin for a united China, and that would be around 200 BC. Its exact course and length is not known, since walls were destroyed rebuilt, moved to different locations, etc., while gaps often existed.

There were other walls of impressive length erected prior, during the age of warring states. of course, efficacy may still be doubted by some historians. Don't mean to go off on a tangent.

Otherwise, historically China under a variety of rulers (and I guess systems) have demonstrated impressive skills at mobilizing resources and realizing gargantuan projects. No doubt about that.

This is as paradoxical than disheartening to witness the growing gap between Western corporations and Chinese one. Westerners have lower payrolls, hence the illusive thought that what "managing staff" (a bevy of professional shedders concealed behind the mask of the good and dynamic guy supposed to make the pill easier to swallow) call "downsizing" are lower too ... but they eventually still sack increasingly workers each business year. Reversely, Chinese have larger firms employing hella more workers, though they do not contend for the podium of best shedding companies.

We can highlight two reasons to that peculiar observation :
- Jobs pertaining to western firms are increasingly outsourced and offshored to China. Therefore, a logical and statistical transfer operates as the western payrolls pour far afield, generally to the advantage of China. This is one clear-cut and undeniable answer.
- Second, China is riding on the wave of skyrocketing growth and over-smiley economic indicators. Some experts deem that, to gild the lily, China's likely to outpace America as early as 2020. Others predict a more gloomy and slackening future, dotted with predictable hindrances. Anyway, in 2011, China's GDP soared by a nice 9%, hence the growing demand for jobs to bolster the exports. In the West, growth figures have been following the dull trend of post-crisis headache : few jobs creations, or worse, cuts in staff to sustain new costs and enhance competitiveness (or simply sating the shareholders' childish tantrums and lucre-driven aspirations).

(1). corporate efficiency is important and chinese ones are generally less efficient than big multinationals, but when it comes right down to it, ‘it’s about jobs, stupid’.

(2). @ ‘fuck c’

hi 'fuck',
taiwan is part of china and even more so now with ECFA. taiwan’s peaceful return to china in unification is an irreversible process that no country in the world openly objects (none of their business anyway). Kinda eat you denders heart out doesn’t it?

by the way, like most taiwanese, foxconn chairman’s parent were all born and from the mainland. taiwanese are chinese alright.